


Til Death

by graceling_in_a_suit



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: (of the suburban kind), Blood and Gore, Cannibalism, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Happy Ending, Horror Elements, M/M, Mentions of homophobia and homophobic violence, Murder, Murder Husbands, Mutilation, Santa Clarita Diet AU, Supernatural Harry, Zombies, also the regular kind of violence, but also LOVE!, mentions of the f slur
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-25
Updated: 2019-06-25
Packaged: 2020-05-19 07:10:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19352008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/graceling_in_a_suit/pseuds/graceling_in_a_suit
Summary: Harry and Louis are just your average suburban couple having a perfectly normal lover's tiff.An AU inspired by Netflix's Santa Clarita Diet.





	Til Death

**Author's Note:**

> This is part of a Wordplay prompt challenge for the prompt "foot". To read the amazing fics that were written by the others on this prompt, [click here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/foot), and to see all fics written as part of the challenge (including years 1 and 2), [click here](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/wordplay_fic_challenge/works). You can also find the masterpost for this year’s challenge [here](https://wordplayfics.tumblr.com/post/185709101043/wordplay-2019-every-week-for-five-weeks-a-prompt).
> 
> Please make sure you read the tags!

Louis sighed as he cut the engine. He’d been so ready to leave—foot on the pedal, eyes alert for passing cars, one moment away from reversing—but he couldn’t do it.

He grumbled to himself as he slammed the door shut behind him. He shoved his keys into the pocket of his trousers—sweatpants that colour-matched with his tee, at least his outfit was comfortable and organised even if the rest of his life was a mess—and stomped back towards the storage unit.

He stopped once he’d reached it, crouching so he could reach the handle.  
  
“Fuck, I left it open?” Louis said under his breath. _That could’ve been bad._

With a swift tug, the garage-style door pulled up and away. He ducked underneath it then hurriedly pulled it back down from inside.

He leaned his head against the metal for a moment, then turned towards the only piece of furniture in the room—a padlocked meat freezer.

“Hello, again,” he said.

The meat freezer didn’t respond.

Louis pursed his lips and fiddled with his keys. He bent over to undo the padlock, tossed it aside, and pushed the lid up and out of the way.

Two lifeless eyes stared up at him. They were attached to a lifeless face on a lifeless neck; lifeless shoulders and a lifeless chest. The man’s legs and arms had been sawed off so he’d fit inside, and they were stacked on top of him like carrots in a crowded vegetable drawer.

“How are you?” Louis asked. “Cold? I’m guessing cold.”

There a slight mist to the air as the warmth of the storage unit—after baking in the sun all day, it was stuffy and unpleasant—met the icicles in the freezer (both traditional and human-shaped).

Louis parked himself down on the ground, crossing his legs so he could lean his chin on the edge of the freezer. “Look, mate,” he said, meeting the eyes of the dead body, “there’s no need to be like that. So–” he waved his hand towards the frozen expression of anguish, “– _judgy._ You wouldn’t have died if you hadn’t been a homophobic piece of shit! Which one of us here chose to stalk a man down an empty street at four in the morning because he looked ‘faggy’? Hint: wasn’t me.”

A droplet of dew landed on the corpse’s eyeball from the freezer’s lid hovering open above it.

Louis made a face at him. He still couldn’t look directly at the mortal wound in the man’s throat—if he did, all he'd see was his Harry, sinking his teeth into this man’s flesh, ripping until he met bone. “Yeah, I know. He didn’t _have_ to kill you, but he did, so there’s no use whining about it now.” He sighed and leaned back on his hands so he could stare up at the corrugated iron ceiling. “He wasn’t always like this, you know? Time was, I would have laughed in your face if you told me my husband was a—well. You know.”

Louis closed his eyes. He squeezed them shut and he thought back—back to before all this had started, before they’d even left school, before they’d met for the first time—and he remembered the way Harry had looked in that table in the corner of the library, head bent over a familiar-looking stack of papers.

“Hey, is that the script for _Grease?”_ Louis had said, parking himself into the chair next to a beautiful curly-headed boy as he blinked at Louis owlishly. “You in the musical?”

The boy had nodded and flashed Louis a dazzling grin. “Yeah, just got cast this morning. I’m proper excited.”

And Louis had squinted at him playfully, leaning closer. “Don’t remember seeing you at auditions, mate,” he’d said, gaze lingering over his fresh-from-a-growth-spurt body. He'd then poked the boy’s hip, because it was there and he wanted to.

The boy had giggled and squirmed away. “I was there, I promise. Louis, right? You’re gonna be Danny Zuko?”

“That’s me!” Louis’d said, chest puffing out like the bird of paradise trying to impress its mate that he secretly was. “You gonna be my Sandy?”

And the boy had ducked his head, sniffed, and rearranged his fringe.

“And then he said—get this, it’s fucking _adorable–”_ present-day Louis rambled, looking back at the body in the meat freezer for the first time since he’d started his story. “He said, ‘no, but I could be your Harry?’”

The body didn’t react like Louis was used to—he’d told this story a hundred times, including at his wedding, and without fail it was met with besotted cooing—but Louis wasn’t deterred. “Of course, I was bloody confused—no idea this lad’s name, and he was agreeing to be _mine_ after two minutes, honestly!—but that was pretty much that. Three years of dating, one year of being engaged, and five years married! Or, we will be, in…” Louis squinted, crunching the numbers. “A month and two days. _Shit,_ what a mess.”

He pushed himself to his feet and started pacing, arms and hands flying everywhere as he ranted. “I’ve been so busy with all the fucking… murdering, and cannibalism, and the _bodies in meat freezers–”_ Louis pointed at said body accusingly, “–I haven’t even got him a present! What could I possibly get him, a school bus full of nummy children?” He laughed deliriously. “‘Happy anniversary, honey! Our lives have fallen apart since you mysteriously became undead a month ago and started _eating our neighbours,_ but sod all that! Here’s a shiny emerald to celebrate our love! Hope you can forget the time I called you a monster and you stormed out and I lost my mind yelling at a corpse!’ Fuck.” Louis slid down the wall, landing with a thud on the ground. He buried his head in his hands, then buried his hands in his knees, then tried really, really hard not to cry in front of the nameless dead body.

The nameless dead body of a man who’d cornered his husband in an alleyway with the intent to do harm, not knowing that he’d picked the _wrong_ fucking guy.

Up until a month ago, that wouldn’t have been the case.

The old Harry, the one who hadn’t woken up one day, all _zombified_ and _murdery ;_ that Harry would’ve never hurt a fly. Even with all the boxing classes in the world, he wouldn’t have dared defend himself. Maybe that’s why Louis had chosen today, _this_ body out of all the ones that had been so far, to start breaking.

Because he was so fucking scared. Terrified—shaken to the core—about what could have been.

He started laughing, then. His shoulders shook with it for a moment, then he lifted his head and giggled into the emptiness of the storage unit. “You wanna know what’s so funny?” he asked, even though from this angle he couldn’t see the body over the lip of the freezer. “You’re probably on your right-wing message boards every day, talking about the ‘gay agenda' or some rot. Well, guess what,” Louis snorted, then grinned sharply. “It’s real and its got teeth and it fucking _killed you._ How’s that for justice, dickhead?”

There was silence. Louis breathed in the warm, stale air—the longer he left that lid off, the sooner it would be that ‘stale’ turned into ‘putrid’—and he listened to the beat of his heart and he thought about his husband. Harry had probably made it back home by now—he’d run out of here without taking the keys, but he was the one who’d hidden all the spares in the first place. He was probably in the kitchen making himself a body-part-shake, sipping it through a straw with that adorable groove in his brow he got when he was pissed off. Maybe he’d showered—he liked to do that after he got angry, he said it washed off like dirt—and his hair was curling as it dried.

Louis’ eyes watered at the image.

“Just because he’s undead, doesn’t mean he’s not still the love of my fucking life,” Louis said. This time, he wasn’t talking to the body. “And what kind of husband am I, to call him a monster for… well, for killing and eating people, that bit’s still fucked up—but. Daisy feels the same way about me eating meat, and she still loves me, right? Couldn’t it be the same?”

The dead body in the meat freezer was inclined to disagree, but Louis was inclined to ignore it.

He’d had his tantrum, and he was ready to be an adult again. He stood, rolled his sleeves up, picked up a saw, and got to work.

 

***

 

Harry Styles was standing in his kitchen, drinking a shake made out of human liver, and frowning.

He glanced back at the clock on the wall, down at his phone, then back up at the clock.

He sighed. He ran his fingers through his still-drying hair.  
  
His shower had worked all the anger out of his system, but. That meant he was left with all the frustration, pain, hurt, confusion, bloodlust, hunger…

He shook himself off and took another gulp of his shake. He couldn’t go out and kill anyone tonight, no matter how much he wanted to.

Because any minute now, his husband was going to walk through that door, and they were going to have a very uncomfortable discussion.

Harry knew how it was going to go—Louis was loving and attentive but he could also be a stubborn asshole once he’d gotten his teeth sunk into something. And sure, he knew that Harry’s life had been infinitely better since his...rebirth, and he knew that Harry wouldn’t ever hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, and he also knew that just because Harry’s heart no longer beat and he bled black goo instead of blood that it didn’t mean he’d _ever_ stop loving him– shit.

Harry blinked. Then, he blinked again.

He set down his shake onto the counter and lifted his hand to study it.

It looked the same as it always had—still his knobbly knuckles, still his skin that stretched over his veins, still his wedding ring—but Harry hadn’t expected it to look any different.

That was the point, wasn’t it?

That it probably wasn’t _ever_ going to look different.

Harry let out a delirious laugh. _I mean… I’m dead, right?_ He thought, for once skipping over the part where thinking that made his head hurt. _I’m not going to age. If I don’t get myself killed, then I could live forever._

It was a humbling thought.

Harry’s brow re-creased and he resumed the drinking of his shake while he thought it over. Because… did he really _want_ to live forever?

The answer came to him so easily. _No,_ it  said. _Not without Louis._

Then, another thought followed;  _guess we'll have to take him with us._

That was how Louis found him not a minute later.

“Hi.”

Harry looked up, face stretching into a reflexive smile at the sight of his husband standing at the doorway to the kitchen, hands tucked behind his back in that furtive way he did when he was about to do something romantic.

 _Hi, sweetheart—_ It was on the tip of his tongue.

Then he remembered that earlier today Louis had watched him rip someone’s throat out with his teeth. Earlier today, Louis had called him a monster with tears in his eyes and a stranger’s blood on his favourite pair of sweats.

“Uh–” Harry choked. He set down his shake nervously and fiddled with a piece of paper on the table. “Hi.” He squinted at the paper. “Did you forget to pick up Clifford’s worm tablets yesterday? I thought I reminded you.”

Louis cleared his throat. Harry looked up in time to see him shuffle his feet and adjust his grip on whatever it was he was hiding behind his back.

“I did forget, yeah.” He met Harry’s eyes, piercing and sincere as only Louis could be. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

Harry shook his head slowly. “It’s okay, I’ll just go tomorrow–”

Louis huffed. “Not about the worm tablets. Look. Here.” He marched forwards and thunked something down onto the table, nearly toppling Harry’s drink. Then, he stepped away, and Harry could see it clearly.

“Wow, a cardboard box,” he mumbled, just the hint of a grin peeking through. “You shouldn’t have.”

Louis looked like he wanted to roll his eyes—a twitch by the corners, his lips curling up and his nose wrinkling—but he refrained. “Just open it, Harry.”

Harry pulled the lid off slowly, half expecting something to jump out at him.

The last time Louis had gotten him a box like this, he’d spent all day driving out to some field and collecting wildflowers. He’d done it just to put an end to some silly argument about which one of them had broken the tv remote. Really, it had been about more than that; a job offer Louis’d turned down because he hadn’t wanted to push Harry into relocating. But really, _really_ , it had been about more than that also; it had been about commitment, and if the life they’d built together was conditional. Louis’d answered that question by calling in sick to work and collecting him a box of wildflowers—don’t ask Harry how, but it was an _excellent_ answer—and he’d been a little sunburned and a lot proud when he’d shoved it into Harry’s hands that night, and Harry hadn’t been expecting the giant fucking grasshopper that had jumped out at him the second he opened it. (Neither had Louis, of course).

There was no grasshopper this time.

But Louis was still answering that same question.

“Wow, is this–” Harry whispered, shoving the lid aside and scooping up the contents of the box.

“The left foot of that homophobe you killed?” Louis asked. He looked one second away from a full-body wince.

“Yeah, but it’s got a bow on it!” Harry was unable to keep himself from melting.

Louis’ shoulders relaxed. He smiled, then; the first proper smile Harry had seen from him today. He didn’t even stop smiling when Harry lifted the sawed off ankle to his face so he could take a blissful sniff of coagulated blood.

“I was just thinking, after you left,” Louis started, leaning against the table, “about what I’d said to you. And I want you to know I’m sorry. I meant it at the time—baby, don’t look at me like that, you hate it more when I lie to you—but I think it was just the fear talking. I’ve been so afraid for a month now, ever since you–” he stopped, choking.

“Died and came back again?” Harry supplied.

“Yes,” Louis said. “That. Ever since that. I know you say you feel so much stronger and more confident, but I’m so scared something bad’s gonna happen. Gifts don’t just come with no cost; we still don’t know how this even happened to you–”

“I’m pretty sure the cost is that I have to kill and eat people,” Harry interrupted, words coming out muffled around the toe he was chewing.

Louis huffed. “Will you stop interrupting? And don’t talk while you’re eating, you know how cute I think you are when you do that and I’m _trying_ to apologise.”

Harry swallowed and motioned for Louis to continue.

“Thank you,” Louis said, feeling bold enough to shuffle over to Harry’s side of the table. Once he was close enough, he picked up Harry’s hand—the one not currently holding a dead man’s four-toed foot—and cradled it gently between his own. His thumb brushed over Harry’s wedding ring, and his lips lifted. “Darling,” he said, and Harry put the foot down so he could give Louis his full attention. “I promise you that I don’t think you’re a monster. I promise you that I’m going to stay by your side throughout all of this. And… I can’t promise I’ll have much of a stomach for watching you rip out people’s organs with your bare hands, but. I can promise that I will always love you.”

Harry looked into Louis’ eyes, those twinkling baby blues. He used to think he could drown in them, but that was when he still felt fear.

Now, nothing could hurt him.

And in all that blue… he could _fly._

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Really enjoyed writing this lil one. There's a post for it over on my [tumblr](https://graceling-in-a-suit.tumblr.com/post/185842107005/till-death-by-graceling-in-a-suit-2k-harry-and) if you wanna chuck that a like/reblog :) xx


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